How New York lost its bookstores

Guardian -Like payphones, typewriter repair shops and middle-class housing, bookstores are a vanishing presence in New York City. In 1950, Manhattan had 386 bookstores, according to Gothamist; by 2015, the number was down to 106. Now, according to a count by the city’s best-known bookstore, the Strand, there are fewer than 80.

In literary New York, the closing of another bookstore elicits a sense of crisis – and sometimes emergency measures. In January, after the Drama Book Shop, a pillar of the city’s theatre community, announced it could no longer afford its rent, Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of the play Hamilton, stepped in to purchase the shop along with three of his Hamilton collaborators. This was Miranda’s second intervention; in 2016 he led a crowdfunding campaign to support the store after a pipe burst and destroyed part of its inventory. The shop is currently closed while Miranda and his business partners seek a new, less expensive location.

Independent bookstores are getting squeezed from multiple directions, including competition from Amazon – whose massive purchasing power and low margins undercut brick-and-mortar operations – and consumer technology: ebooks, Kindles and tablets, and attention-stealing smartphones. Statistics on reading habits are famously difficult to parse, but the bad news is that yes, Americans do appear to be reading less. This is a long-term trend, dating from the arrival of television, and one that appears to accelerate with each generation.